Day 317

Day 316

First Steps

Hey, so, Eloise took about four steps today! Halting, mincing, shaky steps that carried her forward a total distance of about 8 centimeters, but still!

(Attempts to reproduce the feat so far have resulted in one rather annoyed and put-upon baby girl with a sore bottom.)

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Day 314

Parent Cards

Has this ever happened to you? You’re out walking with the babies in the stroller, or hanging out in the park and along comes another parent with a baby or babies about the same age, and you get to chatting, and you think, “Hey, we should hang out some time, and get the kids together, and, man, we need some more friends with kids,” but then you go your way and they go theirs and you never see them again, or you just end up “Hi” friends as you pass each other every once in a while?

It’s a problem, right? So Rachel and I came up with a genius solution: parent cards. You make up some business cards with your names, your kids’ names and ages, and your phone number and email address, and keep a stack of them in your stroller or diaper bag, and when you run into another parent, you exchange them and then later you can call each other and have a playdate.

I’m sure it would be a little weird and awkward the first time you hand one out, but once it catches on, it would just become totally normal. Spread the word! Parent cards.

Of course, Rachel and I came up with this idea months ago, and never actually made parent cards, and then the latest issue of Babytalk showed up at our house, and of course it has this VERY SAME IDEA in it, but they call them “Mommy Cards.” Stupid sexist parenting-industrial complex. It’s still a good idea, though.

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Hungry Monkey, Matthew Amster-Burton

A shamefully long time ago—I’m talking months—the marvelous Kelly at Bellani Maternity handed me a book as the kids and I were walking in to Tot Gym class. “Here,” she said, “I think you might like this.”

A book about parenting and feeding written by a stay-at-home foodie dad named Matthew? Why, yes, I might be interested in such a thing. Having read it, I can wholeheartedly recommend Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father’s Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater if you are interested in at least two of the following three things:

• Parenting
• Food
• How awesome it is to live in Seattle

Parenting books that tell you what you should do kind of get on my nerves, especially when they’re written by non-experts, and especially when the five books on your shelf express five different strongly help opinions about THE ONE THING YOU MUST DO. Hungry Monkey is refreshing, because except for the recipes at the end of each chapter, Amster-Burton doesn’t give instructions or suggestions or even advice. He just tells you what he did, and how well it did or didn’t work. His goal was to raise a foodie like himself, an adventurous and eager eater, and to avoid “baby food” as much as possible. Since I love to cook, and since I badly want to raise children who love to eat and try new things and who will appreciate what I’m slaving over in the kitchen, this was a goal that I shared.

I do think that Iris Amster-Burton, the eponymous hungry monkey, was an unusually adventurous child, culinarily speaking, and mileage will vary widely. Our babies were much slower to take to “grown up” food, and we’ve had to be much more careful about milling or pureeing their food. (Julian, for instance, has a hair-trigger gag reflex, and if he gets too big a piece of food in his mouth, or if even a small piece of food ends up on the back of his tongue where he doesn’t expect it, BLEARGH.) I don’t think you should read the book as a road map and expect that your experience will be the same as the author’s, and it’s occasionally been a struggle for me not to be disappointed when the babies didn’t respond the way the baby in the book did, or when I don’t have time to get an elaborate home-cooked meal for the four of us on the table by 6:00.

Hungry Monkey’s most important function (apart from being a very funny and enjoyable book with some delicious-looking recipes in it) is as a corrective to all of the other baby-feeding advice out there. I was especially tickled to read his skewering of Ruth “Super Baby Food” Yaron, a best-selling author with no qualifications as a nutritionist or pediatrician whose “bland is best” diet would have parents milling their own goddamn grains. (I mean, is there anything more “Stuff White People Like” than milling their own cereal? For cripes sake.) The feeding philosophy of Hungry Monkey is, basically, “Dude, just feed your baby,” and having Amster-Burton’s sarcastic and carefree voice in the back of my head has been therapeutic.

Despite my plans to feed the babies only homemade, delicious, flavorful food from my own kitchen, we’ve ended up dividing their meals roughly into one-third homemade baby food, one-third grown-up food (either off of our plates or run through the food mill or food processor), and one-third store-bought. We’ve had the best luck with Plum brand baby food, which comes frozen and actually tastes pretty good when heated up. Their favorite flavor is their Vegetable Stew with Beef, but since we want to raise polite and respectful children, we’ve been referring to the beef stew by its full name, Beef Stewart. (Likewise, George Squashington and Yogertrude.)

Despite my initial scoffing (scoffery?), we’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of Annabel Karmel’s Top 100 Baby Purees. I’ll whip up a batch every week or so and store it in Baby Cubes in our downstairs freezer. I honestly thought I wouldn’t need to look at a recipe to figure out how to steam some vegetables and put them in the food processor, but Karmel’s suggestions for good combinations really are both creative and helpful. My one criticism is that her indications of how many servings a given recipe will produce seem wildly off. A recipe that claims to make 4 servings will generally work out to a tray and half or more of Baby Cubes. (I do play a little fast and loose with the quantities, but not by that much.)

As for “real food,” it’s been really exciting to see what they’ll eat and enjoy. Generally speaking, when we have leftovers nowadays, instead of putting them in the fridge for lunch the next day, I’ll run them through the food mill or the food processor and stick them in the freezer in cubes. Julian and Eloise have gobbled up mushroom risotto, smoked salmon chowder, three-bean chili, chana masala, pasta with tomato sauce, and probably more things that I can’t think of. They’ve happily and eagerly snacked on pieces of quesadillas from Whole Foods. They love pickles and plums (not necessarily together). There aren’t that many foods they don’t seem to like, to be honest. They’re not wild about summer squash or chicken, but I think our sample size is too small to draw any definitive conclusions.

As much as we try to broaden their palates and provide them with variety, the twins are babies, and I think they would happily eat Happy Baby Puffs and applesauce for every meal—at various times we’ve had to institute moratoria on both foods to try to convince them to eat ANYTHING ELSE. They have essentially the same breakfast every day (oatmeal and yogurt with some kind of fruit) and don’t seem to mind. But as they get more comfortable with chewing, and get a few more teeth, and as their hand-eye coordination improves, I think mealtimes are going to get more and more fun. I think I’m looking forward to a time when they can express an opinion about what they’d like to eat, even when we enter the inevitable “nothing but macaroni and cheese” phase.

Anyhow, Hungry Monkey is a great book and a quick read, and I’m very grateful to Kelly and Bellani for giving to me. You should all, like, go there and spend a lot of money, or something.

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Day 308

Please Don’t Feed the Animals

10 month post forthcoming. I’m having a hard time pulling this one together. In the meantime, please enjoy this (admittedly not exactly action-packed) window into an aspect of my morning routine with the babies.

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Day 306

Ten Months

I’ve had a hard time getting started on this monthly post, because I always feel as though these updates should have some broad themes rather than being a laundry list of what new things Julian and Eloise are doing. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to come up with any theme other than something along the lines of “More of the Same, But a Bit Better.”

I know that the babies are changing quickly — getting more mobile, more interactive, more vocal, etc. — but that has been the trajectory for months now. Lately it feels as though the most fun things are not the big developmental milestones, but the little transient skills and quirks that the babies surprise us with. For example, lately Eloise has been finding it hilarious when she sneezes. She’ll sneeze once or twice, then grin hugely and look around for us to confirm, “hey, that was hysterical, right?” Julian has been cracking us up for a while with his habit of wagging his hand back and forth over his mouth while making a sustained vocalization to hear the yodeling effect. (For a long time if we wagged his hand for him, he’d automatically make the noise, but now he’s totally self-sufficient.) I’m not sure whether most babies do this, because we’ve noticed that Eloise has just started doing the same thing. Finally, a favorite new development is the way they practically leap onto us when we pick them up, often screeching with delight, grabbing on with all limbs like little spider monkeys. I could never get tired of that.

One big milestone that I do think maybe we should be trumpeting here is that we think Eloise is saying her first words. I always thought that it would be clear when either baby went from meaningless babbling to saying an actual word — I’m not sure why, but I thought I’d just know. Turns out it’s not that obvious. But Eloise has been saying a very distinct “hi” for a couple of weeks now, and she will reliably do it when she sees a person, a cat, or a ceiling fan. (It’s the ceiling fan bit that throws me — is she really saying hi?) She also says “hi kee” or “hi kee-hee,” often indiscriminately, but almost always when she sees one of the cats. I don’t really dare wonder whether she’s saying “hi kitty”…well, okay, I do dare wonder. Matt thinks no, I think maybe, and Jen, our nanny, thinks yes. Finally, she has been saying “uh oh” whenever she throws or drops something — or when she’s about to. If I’m looking away from her when she’s in her high chair, and I hear her say “uh oh,” I can pretty much guarantee that when I turn around, she’ll be holding her sippy cup off the side of her tray, getting ready to drop it. It is incredibly cute and makes it very difficult to discourage that particular behavior.

As we learn more about their personalities each month, it is hard not to wonder when (and to what extent) we will see gender differences emerge. There are probably some stereotypical things you could point to that would suggest they’ve already started to appear — for example, Julian will watch passing trucks for much longer than Eloise will when we sit outside, and when they play with blocks, Eloise really seems to be trying to stack them, while Julian is Entropy Boy and only wants to knock everything over. On the other hand, there are ways in which the two of them diverge from standard boy/girl expectations. Eloise has a serious arm and will throw everything — rattles, wooden balls, blocks, books, and, once, the large Magic Mozart Cube. She’s pretty indiscriminate not only about what she throws, but what she’s throwing at. Poor Julian has been clocked in the head with a Fisher Price Roll-A-Round more than once. She’s great and playing “catch,” throwing a ball to one of us after we roll it to her, while Julian prefers to stuff the ball into his mouth. He is also generally more content to play quietly on his own, while Eloise wants to run around the house for as long as a poor, suffering adult can be persuaded to lend two fingers and keep up with her. Really it’s probably too early to see any real gender differences. (This in spite of the fact that often, when I describe the twins’ personalities, whoever I’m talking to will immediately attribute their personality characteristics to their sexes. “That’s a girl/boy for you!” I’m told. I am nearly positive that if I were to completely reverse my description of their personalities, I’d be told the exact same thing.) Still, it’s an interesting thing to be thinking about. I’m open to the possibility/reality of gender differences, though I do want to try to avoid creating them myself.

Some other highlights of this month include visits to some (relatively) unfamiliar places for the babies, including friends’ houses and Lake Winnipesaukee. In just about every case the babies did better than we expected. They continue to enjoy experiencing new sensations and had a great time up at the lake, showing real excitement every time we carried them down to the water’s edge to dip their toes in. One of the nicest developments this month is that Eloise has apparently decided that she does not wish death upon all humans outside her immediate family and has even become more outgoing and sociable than Julian, who is going through a bit of a shy phase.

As the babies start to show evidence of a transition to toddlerhood (Julian is a super-cruiser and Eloise seems determined to walk as soon as possible), we find ourselves encountering minor “Sunrise, Sunset” moments at every turn. Last week we said good-bye to the baby bucket seats and upgraded to fancy Britax convertible car seats. Bouncy seats are gone, safety gates are up. Boppy pillows and Bumbos are out, push toys are in. Matt organized the giant pile of baby crap in the basement, and it was odd to discover that there are more clothes and gear that they’ve outgrown than there is stuff we’re waiting for them to grow into. A year ago the possibility of such a scenario would never have occurred to me.

One thing that did occur to me, but which I often doubted I would survive to see, is that sometimes having twins is fun — and by that I mean even better than having a singleton. Later this week Matt is going to post a video of Julian pushing Eloise on their Little Tikes Push and Ride Racer, and upon viewing it you will all — male or female, young or old — run out and take potent fertility drugs so that you, too, can birth twins and replicate such astronomical levels of cuteness in your own homes. The Adirondack chair photos in this post and here are another example — one baby in one Adirondack chair would be unremarkable at best, lonely and sad at worst. Sure, Julian brazenly steals whatever toy Eloise is playing with, no matter how many appealing alternatives he has in front of him, and if she’s in his path when he’s cruising around the furniture, he has no problem attempting to cruise right through her, totally oblivious to her very loud protests. (In fact, she has developed a distinct noise — it sounds like an angry Donald Duck — that she uses exclusively when Julian is bothering her. Our first sibling squabbles!) I know that will only become more challenging in the coming months, but as long as we get those uber-cute twin moments to balance them out, I think it’ll be worth it.

So that’s ten months! We made it to double digits. The fact that I can’t believe it shouldn’t suggest that it went fast — in fact, it seems impossible it was only a year ago that I was writing the thank-you notes from our baby shower. But as I said to my dear twin-mom friend Julia the other day (a kindred spirit whose twins are a week older than Julian and Eloise — truly she is the lifeline that the universe threw me after misjudging that what I wanted more than anything in the world was twins), I’m sure that when we’re celebrating their 10th birthdays we’ll think all of this went by in the blink of an eye. Probably because we’ll be mostly senile by then.

Day 305

Month 10

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Day 303

I Am 14 Years Old

Plan Toys is a company that makes some very nice wooden toys. We have the Punch and Drop, and the kids really enjoy pushing the wooden balls through the holes, or knocking them together, or generally tossing them around. It’s a hit.

The names of some of their other products, though, just consistently make me giggle. Hammer Balls? Miracle Pounding? Come on.

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Day 298

Lactation Cessation

Anyone who has spent even a modest amount of time with me since Julian and Eloise were born knows that producing milk for them utterly consumed my thoughts and actions for the first couple months of their lives, and it largely consumed them for several subsequent months. I agonized over the contents of every bottle, over the maintenance of my supply, over whether the whole thing was worth it, given the sudden surge of “press” suggesting that maybe breast milk and breastfeeding aren’t really all they’re cracked up to be.

And now it’s over. I pumped for the last time on Saturday night, before we left for our vacation in New Hampshire. The babies got their last bottles of breast milk the following day. I imagined that feeding them those bottles would be emotional, and I hoped somewhat sweet. Unfortunately, they only drank half the bottles in their car seats before we hit the road, and they finished them at a pathetic little gas station just north of Concord where we’d pulled over to deal with a truly putrid diaper and inconsolable screaming. Not exactly the most meaningful end to one of the most difficult and amazing things I’ve ever done in my life, but I think that distraction and humor served me better at that point than reverent reflection, which almost certainly would have ended in tears.

A snapshot of the last 10 months:

• 60.23 total gallons pumped (this does not, of course, include whatever milk Eloise drank while nursing)

• 1,384 pumping sessions, totaling an estimated 346 hours (14.5 days) spent pumping

• Just 7 ounces lost in two spills (not counting regular quarter-ounce drips here and there)

• More Than You Wanted to Know Alert: 32 percent more produced by the right than the left side

• Roughly 2,500 fenugreek tablets swallowed

• Approximately 450 cups of Mother’s Milk tea drunk

• Nearly $1,000 spent on the above plus pump rental, lactation consultant, etc. (not including supplemental formula)

And the result of all that? Well, Eloise nursed nearly exclusively from birth to 5.5 months, when I returned to work. Julian, who couldn’t nurse because of his poor squished jaw, received bottles exclusively, and it was for him that I hooked myself up to the hated pump 5, 6, 7, even 8 times per day, waking up in the middle of the night to pump even long after both babies were sleeping through the night. For the first two months, both babies essentially got nothing but milk. From 2 to 8 months, they got between 2/3 and 3/4 milk (and the rest formula). Once Eloise self-weaned (a very difficult and sad turn of events for me) and there was no longer a live nursing baby to persuade my body to keep up milk production, my supply dwindled, but I was able to give them about 50 percent milk until 9 months, and then I ramped down completely over the three weeks after that.

I know that’s a lot of milk, and I know that, given the circumstances (two babies to feed, only one who could nurse), I did the very best that I could. I can’t help dwell a little on how much I would have liked the whole thing to go very differently, though. I liked nursing. I would have liked to do it for several months longer. I would have liked to have spent far less of early motherhood pumping. And while I’m making a wish list, of course I would have liked to have been able to nurse both babies. But of course all that wishing accomplishes nothing. So now I turn complete responsibility for nourishing my babies over to Whole Foods and PBM Products, makers of Target-brand formula, and I try to readjust to a life in which my body isn’t providing sustenance to any other humans. How mundane.

Circa one month old. Amazingly, given its omnipresence, I couldn’t find any pictures with the pump in the background.

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